Summary

This chapter provided a broad overview of the topics we'll be dealing with in this book. We took a look at the very definition of performance. Next we spent some time describing the Big O notation for describing time and space complexity and we used it in a simple example.

 In the second part of the chapter, we looked into the topic of profiling. We used a manual approach and specialized tools—profilers—to find the slowest part of a simple program.

In the next chapter, I'll briefly return to the topic of selecting the correct algorithm for the job. With a few examples, I'll show you how an algorithm can make or break a program's performance.